One of President Barack Obama’s biggest legacies will be his healthcare plan. Another, thanks to the Edward Snowden leaks, is domestic spying.

But Obama has another legacy, one not so obvious, and which won't be felt until years after he's left office. The history e-books will remember the 44th president for setting off a chain of reforms that made predatory patent lawsuits a virtual memory. Obama is the patent-troll slayer.

The notice-and-takedown system created by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act provides an essential safe harbor for online services to innovate. Without it, content companies would be constantly filing even more copyright suits against online services like YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and Pinterest, and those sites would likely be unable to exist in the face of such liability. However, this is not a two-sided issue. By only looking at copyright holders and online services, we neglect the interests of the most populous sector involved in copyright law: the public.

It's refreshing to hear Dianne Feinstein express outrage over warrantless and illegal government spying, But sadly to say, there’s some dark humor of sorts here, too. Feinstein is perhaps the biggest congressional cheerleader of domestic surveillance, including the telephone snooping program in which all metadata from calls to and from the United States is forwarded to the National Security Agency without probable cause warrants.

Matt Gunn, an independent model aircraft or drone operator in Cleveland, says the recent court ruling barring the Federal Aviation Administration from enforcing rules prohibiting the commercial use of drones amounts to “mud being flung in their face.” Gunn is among more than a dozen small-scale drone operators whom the FAA ordered to cease-and-desist their commercial work with unmanned vehicles, orders nullified Thursday.

Google-owned YouTube is urging a federal appeals court to allow it to re-post an inflammatory trailer from its popular video-sharing site, arguing that the media giant and the public “will suffer irreparable harm to their First Amendment and other constitutional freedoms."

The President Barack Obama administration has received 28 proposals from corporations with ideas for managing the NSA’s massive database of U.S. phone call metadata. But don’t expect to see the proposals any time soon. The government says it won’t release a word.

AT&T released its first "Transparency Report" this week concerning U.S. government surveillance of its customers. But to those familiar with the leaks from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Ma Bell’s numbers come up short by more than 80 million spied-upon customers. All of which means that AT&T’s first foray into Transparency Land is laughable at best and frightening at worst. Surprisingly, though, it’s not AT&T’s fault. Here's why.

Following the leaks of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the U.S. government has released a treasure trove of classified documents in a bid to quell public dissent. But answers to key questions about NSA surveillance have been blacked out from these thousands of pages of once-secret documents, as shown in this WIRED photo gallery.

A clearly frustrated U.S. intelligence chief complained today that America's adversaries are changing the way they communicate electronically in the wake of the leaks by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.